


Bright Will the Skies Seem

by evienne



Category: Billabong Series - Mary Grant Bruce
Genre: Canon Era, Captain Jim, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Relationship, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:20:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26371828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evienne/pseuds/evienne
Summary: Jim, she hoped, would sleep for hours yet, but she needn’t waste any more time herself not thoroughly enjoying the thought that hewouldwake presently, and then they could all spend the whole day together as though there was no War at all.Norah and Wally talk in the early morning after Jim returns from Germany.
Relationships: Norah Linton/Wally Meadows
Comments: 8
Kudos: 8





	Bright Will the Skies Seem

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Norah, Asthore_ by M. J. Cavanagh.

It was before five o’clock in the morning when Norah woke, feeling vaguely as though Christmas and her birthday and a perfect day on horseback were all ahead of her at once. Then she remembered that it was something so very much better than all of those things, and hugged her knees in half-disbelieving delight—then offered a grateful prayer—to think that, of all the wonderful things that could happen, Jim had come home to them last night.

She got up and drew the curtains back, but there was little to see—dawn was yet an hour away at least. Still, Norah dressed, unable to think of going back to sleep now. Jim, she hoped, would sleep for hours yet, but she needn’t waste any more time herself not thoroughly enjoying the thought that he _would_ wake presently, and then they could all spend the whole day together as though there was no War at all. 

Bridie and Katty were eating their breakfast by the kitchen fire when Norah came down, and they looked up with surprise to see her so early. 

“Miss Norah! Is it that we’ve forgotten something?”

Norah shook her head, smiling. “No, I just woke early. I thought I’d come and see what’s been planned for breakfast. It isn’t a special one, but I thought perhaps we could have something extra nice for Mr Jim—and Mr Wally too, if we could manage it.”

“Oh, Miss de Lisle has the great breakfast planned,” said Katty with enthusiasm. “It’s herself that’s been hoarding up for a grand Christmas dinner, and ’tis more than we could ever eat in the one day, so it’s a mercy we have the cause to eat some of it now. We’ll have sausages, she said last night, and eggs, and the pikelets Mr Wally's so fond of, and she’s letting me make a potato cake the way Mother taught me, as it was yourself said the young men liked it. I’m that nervous, but it’s Miss de Lisle thinks I’ll manage.”

“I haven’t the least doubt, Katty,” Norah said, laughing. “It sounds perfectly beautiful—I’ll come in later and tell Miss de Lisle so. Please go on with your breakfast, I’ll just get some things for tea.”

“Let me, miss,” Bridie offered cheerfully, but Norah was firm. 

She took her tea and an extra cup (her father, she thought, was likely to be up early this morning as well) to the library and spent a few minutes building up and lighting the fire. She did not often get the chance to make the fires nowadays, and there was something of a knack to it that sometimes she worried she might lose. But the fire was blazing away merrily only a short time later, sending friendly shadows leaping about the room. Norah curled up on the big lounge that smelled faintly of tobacco with her tea and a packet of letters that had arrived from home a few days ago that she hadn’t had the leisure to enjoy properly until now. Australia came close to her then, but she was not homesick the way she ordinarily was when she read letters from the dear people there—how could she be, when the people who meant _home_ most of all to her were all beneath the same roof as her now?

She was halfway done with the letters when she became aware of a tall shape in the doorway. She looked up with a ‘good morning’ on her lips, expecting her father. But the shape belonged to Wally instead, looking thinner than she had noticed yesterday when he was in his khaki, now dressed in an old football jersey and worn trousers. He wore a pair of socks Norah had knitted for him on his feet, and he entered noiselessly into the library.

“Not tired, Nor?” he asked by way of greeting, crossing the room to her.

She shook her head, smiling at him. “I woke up all of a sudden, and then I remembered why I was so happy, and I couldn’t go back to sleep in case I turned it into a dream.”

Wally nodded in understanding. “I’ve been awake for an hour or two already. I felt a fool—but I was afraid it couldn’t be real either. I got up and went to listen outside Jim’s door. Five months in Germany hasn’t cured him of snoring like a walrus, and really I’ve never heard anything more beautiful in my life. Then I saw the firelight down the hall.”

“I’m glad he’s sleeping so well. I thought Dad wouldn’t ever let him go to bed last night, but I was just as bad: it was all we could do to let him go and wash before having some dinner. We didn’t want to take our eyes off him for one minute. But he must have been sleeping in the most awful places, he was so excited to see a bed with what he called real, live pillows.” She looked at Wally consideringly for a long moment. “You really ought to try going back to sleep yourself, Wally, if you can now. You don’t look rested at all.”

“I’m all right,” Wally said briefly. The answer sounded rather automatic, as though he was used to responding so.

“Well, sit down at least,” said Norah. She tucked her legs beneath her to make room on the big couch, but Wally chose the floor instead and stretched his feet out towards the fire, leaning back up against the foot of the couch beside her. “Tea?” she asked, reaching for the pot beside her. “It’s hot still.”

Wally took a sip of the cup she gave him, and looked rather surprised. “Sugar, Norah?”

“We spoiled ourselves last night, Dad and I, after you and Jim had gone to bed,” explained Norah, indicating the dish beside the pot that had not been tidied away last night, so late had they all been up. “We haven’t had sugar in tea for ever so long, but it was a celebration. Doesn’t it taste just like smoke-oh on branding day?”

“Exactly like that,” Wally agreed around a bigger gulp. “Heavenly. Except we've no business sitting in front of a fire. It ought to be about forty degrees, and I fancy I saw snow in those clouds gathering last night. Odd country, England.”

“I suppose it doesn’t seem odd to the people who grew up here.” The sense of Australia was stronger than ever, with Wally nearby, even if he was quieter and older than the Wally she had shared billy-tea with so many times in a Billabong paddock. She passed the letter she had been reading down to him and took up her own tea. “That’s Brownie’s last; I was just reading it over. It’s hurt dreadfully, getting her letters since Jim—since he disappeared, because the post takes such an age from Australia and even longer from Billabong, and even now I’m only getting the ones she wrote a few months after we heard. So it’s kept it all so terribly fresh. But now Jim is back, it doesn’t hurt a bit—I’m so glad to think how happy the next letter she writes will be.”

“Have you wired Billabong yet?” Wally asked, looking Brownie’s letter over, which bore a tell-tale smudge or two obscuring the words written in the uncertain hand.

“It was nearly the first thing Dad did, to send Allenby out to telegraph. I’ve had such fun imagining how Brownie will cook for the men as though there was never such a thing as War and rations, and then they’ll run up the flag, and Dad told Murty to give everybody a holiday tomorrow. Murty will be scandalised, because it’s bushfire season, but if Billabong burns down because nobody is on hand to pass the buckets it’s in the best cause imaginable!”

Wally laughed suddenly and sharply before falling silent again, and Norah’s heart leapt to hear it: his laugh had become such a rare thing.

“But of course it won’t,” she went on, “because I don’t believe anything terrible could happen this Christmas of all Christmases. The only thing that could make it more perfect would be if we could be there ourselves.”

“Please God there will be many to come, and soon,” Wally said under his breath, so quietly that Norah scarcely heard it.

Under a sudden impulse, she put out a hand to him and clasped his shoulder, only meaning to give him a brief touch of reassurance. But Wally reached up his good hand and held her in a tight grip there for a long quiet moment. His shoulder heaved a little under her hand suddenly, and in a flash of understanding Norah uncurled herself from the couch and slipped down beside him as she would have done if it were Jim in Wally’s place.

Tears had never come easily to Norah, but she had often thought in the past five months that perhaps that dull tightness in her throat which sometimes came when least she expected it might have eased a little if she could only find a way to weep for Jim. Wally, she thought, had been the same—although perhaps his dry eyes had had less to do with a true inability and more with a stubborn self-mastery, a misplaced conviction that he had no right to grieve his friend that way when Mr Linton had lost a son and Norah a brother. But it was the best thing for him now, of that she felt certain, that he not fight it any longer, that he give himself this chance to set everything that had been so black and miserable behind and to look ahead once more to the future.

And so she held his hand very tightly while he did just that and wondered why she had thought Wally so much older lately, when he was really only a boy after all, only a boy who seemed hardly more grown-up than little Geoff and Michael—who had felt terribly alone in his terrible sadness, and who only now, now that he was safe and whole and home once more, could allow himself to realise it. 

At last Wally took a final shuddering breath, held it, and let it out, and he was himself again.

“I’m sorry, Nor,” he said after a while. His voice was thick but otherwise it was steady once more. “I’ve been rather a kid.”

“We don’t need to talk about it unless it helps you,” Norah said gently, knowing that was what he needed her most to say, and Wally looked at her very gratefully.

“I don’t want to talk about it—much,” he said, “only to say that you’re a brick, Norah, and I haven’t told you that nearly enough.”

“You’re tired,” Norah said, a little abashed as she always was when praised sincerely. “And no wonder, after being wounded and travelling so long yesterday—and—and everything.”

He didn’t deny it this time, but only said, “Well, you are, and I don’t forget it even when I don't say it.”

She smiled at him, feeling warm. Wally looked more himself than in months, and only now she realised just how dreadfully much she had missed him, too. She had always until now thought of Jim as coming first, and then of Wally as a very good second-best, but sometime, without her noticing it, there had ceased to be any sort of notion of _best_ at all—there was only Jim and Wally, and neither could be more dear to her. “Should you try go back to bed? No matter if you sleep through breakfast, we’ll keep it warm for you.”

“May I stay?” Wally asked. “If you don’t mind, Nor. It’s comfortable here. Perhaps you could read Brownie’s letter out loud; I’d like it.”

She was only too willing, and he grew heavy against her shoulder while she read him first Brownie’s letter, then Murty’s, and then Jean Yorke’s, until finally Norah looked across at him to find him fast asleep. She could not move without risking waking him, but that did not seem to matter at all, only that Wally slept peacefully without the darkness on his face that had been there so long.

Mr Linton came in a little while later, and Norah hushed him with a finger against her lips. He smiled, understanding all with a glance, and carried his chair across the room to Norah. They kept quiet company, thoroughly contented to only be together, while the two boys they both loved best slept on.

**Author's Note:**

> Let's reflect a moment on the thought that, more than 100 years ago, Norah Linton had more success with overseas travel (or any kind, really) from Victoria than any of the rest of us these days. Hope you're all well, friends. X


End file.
